The determination not to lose is seen as a dangerous trait to your rivals. But to your followers it is the Sine Qua Non of a leader who will not screw you over when things get rough. Do I sense that a Palin this way cometh?

I have no idea why commenters are so upset about Specter's inane remarks. Doesn't every liberal Democrat believe deep down inside that if we only threw enough money at any problem, it would be well and truly solved?

Of all politicians who leave a list of quotables behind Kemp might be the LEAST wrong on so many issues, especially in the modern era. With the exception of Reagan Jack Kemp would have made a far better president than everyone else he ran against -- including his running mate Bob Dole.

Mandatory testing for what? Seeing as how these people, by hypothesis, were already known to have HIV...

That strikes me as a big waste of money.

Yeah, it would be. Systematically testing the known carriers of a virus to see if they carried the virus would be pretty dumb.

It's unclear to me what he actually did advocate. Some Web sites suggest that he wanted everyone with AIDS to be tested for HIV. That would make some sense, especially back in the days when it wasn't universally accepted that HIV caused AIDS.

Other sites say that he wanted cases of AIDS to be mandatorially reported and contacts traced and notified, as we do with cases of other potentially lethal infectious diseases. That squares with my own recollection.

It still seems to me the obvious thing to do when you're faced with a disease that is killing lots of people, but in the mid-80s that was an extremely controversial proposition wrt AIDS. Keeping people's sexuality properly confidential really did seem a bigger priority than did making sure that the people they'd possibly infected knew of their own danger, or than did preventing them from infecting yet others.